


Space

by earlgreytea68, threeplanetswatson



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 18:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68, https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeplanetswatson/pseuds/threeplanetswatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock comes back surrounded by an enormous empty space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Space

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Пустота](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1709333) by [Military_Intelligence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Military_Intelligence/pseuds/Military_Intelligence)
  * Translation into Русский available: [Пустота](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835314) by [Bothersome_Arya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bothersome_Arya/pseuds/Bothersome_Arya)



Sherlock had grown used to pretending that he was someone else. He’d grown used to pretending that he was another person, a person standing off to the side on the pavement, doing something tediously commonplace like sipping out of a takeaway cup of coffee or ineptly trying to hail a cab. That person he was pretending to be would look at him, at the person that he actually was, and they would see…what?

A man with too much nervous energy who couldn’t seem to keep himself still, no matter what he tried; whose hair had grown out just a bit too much; who was chain-smoking cigarettes between fingers that shook; who was all alone, with an enormous empty space by his side. 

Sherlock came back to London and the enormous empty space by his side hugged him coldly, and he sat impatient through what Mycroft called a “debrief” and Sherlock called “torture,” and he pretended that he was someone else, one of the lackeys drifting in and out of the room, all of them looking at him and appraising: some weight lost; a new scar low on his neck; and that enormous empty space by his side. 

Sherlock looked around him, at the emptiness on either side of the chair he was in. 

Mycroft said, “Are you even paying attention to me?”

Sherlock said, “Tell me about John.”

***

Sherlock pretended that he was someone else, the first time he caught sight of John again. He was hiding behind a newspaper, and he wasn’t trying very hard to hide, because a very large part of him had no problem with the idea that John might catch sight of him and force the confrontation. John was across the street, at a newsagent’s, counting out money, and if Sherlock pretended, when he looked at John, what he saw was a perfectly pleasant and ordinary man, blonde hair going gray, a bit on the short side, dressed unremarkably and with little care. If Sherlock pretended he was someone else, he could imagine lifting his newspaper back up and never thinking again of the nondescript man at the newsagent’s. 

But Sherlock wasn’t someone else. Sherlock was Sherlock, with an enormous empty space by his side, and Sherlock looked at the nondescript man at the newsagent’s and saw _John_ , so ridiculous, so silly, so much his, with all of the steady strength that would stop Sherlock from whirling out of control the way he was currently doing, with his habit for smiling at Sherlock just when Sherlock was sure he wouldn’t, for laughing at Sherlock when Sherlock was being funny, something that no one else had ever appreciated before. John, short and poorly dressed, sending his polite and unassuming smile to the newsagent – John who was just the size of the enormous empty space next to Sherlock. 

And then a woman walked up to John. Was she pretty? Sherlock tried to pretend he was someone else to evaluate the woman. Conclusion: the woman was plainly hideous. She was garish and horrible. She had a grating laugh. There was nothing redeeming about this woman who John kissed in greeting as if John ought to be kissing her in greeting. 

Sherlock crumpled up his newspaper in a dramatic fit. John tucked the woman’s hand into the crook of his arm in an overly gallant gesture and wore his flirtation face at her and didn’t even look over at the tantrum that Sherlock was having. 

Sherlock went and bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked through half of it before the car rolled up and Mycroft said, “What are you doing?”

“I am planning a murder,” Sherlock said, and took an unsteady drag on the cigarette and tried not to vibrate out of his skin. 

“Get in the car,” Mycroft said, as if Sherlock had not just plainly told him he was going to commit a crime. 

“Poison is the way to go,” Sherlock said. 

“Make it look like an accident?” said Mycroft. 

“Oh, God, no, I want everyone to know I did it.” Sherlock blew out a long trail of smoke, watched it drift off, up into the washed-out winter sky above his head. London noise blared all around him, and next to him was an enormous empty space. 

“Get in the car, Sherlock,” Mycroft said. 

“She’s a horrible woman,” Sherlock said. “She’s going to kill him in his sleep.”

“Doubtful. For one thing, he still sleeps with a gun in his nightstand.”

Sherlock was horrified. “That’s even worse! She’s going to kill him with his own gun!”

“She isn’t going to kill him. She’s a perfectly respectable receptionist.”

Sherlock glared at Mycroft and said, “That’s what’s going to kill him.”

***

“I told you he was dating someone,” Mycroft said. 

Sherlock wished he’d had the energy to get up and block Mycroft from getting into the hotel room, but Sherlock was lying on the bed, the weight of the enormous empty space all around him too heavy for him to push off. He stared at the ceiling and said, “He’s always dating someone.”

“Precisely,” agreed Mycroft. “She isn’t serious. They never are.”

Sherlock said nothing. 

“When are you going to tell him you’re alive?”

Sherlock said nothing.

“What was your plan for telling him?”

Sherlock said nothing. 

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock stared at the ceiling and said, “I thought he would see me, and he would see the space beside me, and he would step right into it.”

There was a moment of silence. 

“You should prepare yourself for the probability that he’s not going to do that,” Mycroft ventured, eventually, delicately.

Sherlock stared up at the ceiling. And said nothing. 

***

John was ready for his next appointment, and wanted to stretch his legs a little, and so he wandered into the front of the surgery, by the reception desk, and there in between the ringing phone and the computer monitor lay an audacious bouquet of roses. There had to be three dozen of them, in perfectly curled-in rosebud state, blood red and screaming _drama_ through the entire otherwise somewhat dreary place. They were so unexpected that they almost looked ridiculous sitting there. 

“Hello,” John said, pausing to pick up his next patient file. “Someone’s anniversary?” He looked pleasantly at their receptionist, who was decidedly single and rolled her eyes at him as she answered the phone. 

“Actually,” said Sarah, leaning over the receptionist to get a pen, “they’re for you.”

John blinked. “For me?”

“Uh-huh.” Sarah nodded and plucked a card out of the bouquet. “Dr. John Watson, that’s you.” She handed him the card. 

John took it, confused, and opened it. It was blank. Nothing. No indication of who it was from. 

  


John cocked his head at the curious bouquet and felt a little cold. Anonymous roses. It seemed suspicious. John hated when suspicious things happened. They made him think of Sherlock, made him miss Sherlock, all over again. 

John told the receptionist to take the roses home. 

***

John didn’t tell his current girlfriend about the roses. Because it wasn’t like he was actually _serious_ about the current girlfriend, and he didn’t want to get into possible jealousy issues. It was bad enough that most of them managed to be jealous of a man who had died months ago; John didn’t also want to give Isla fodder for being jealous of a living, breathing person, too. 

Which made him sound terrible, like a really bad boyfriend. Or at least like a boyfriend who wasn’t all that into his girlfriend.

But she was pretty and sweet and she meant that he didn’t spend his nights alone, brooding, and that was a good thing in his book. An important thing. The most important thing. 

He didn’t tell her about the roses, but he couldn’t help telling her about the kissogram. Because she was the one who opened the door to the flat. John had been shaving, and he heard the knock on the door and hear Isla answer it and heard her say, “No, you must have the wrong flat,” and then, “ _Really_?” and then she showed up in the bathroom doorway and said, “You’ll never believe it.”

“I’ll never believe what?”

“What’s at the door.”

“What?” repeated John. “Not who?”

“Go and see.” 

John couldn’t tell if Isla was pleased or not by whatever was at the door. With trepidation, he went to see. 

  


“You’re Doctor Watson?” the woman dressed as something vaguely resembling a nurse asked, brightly, upon catching sight of him. 

John wasn’t sure he wanted to answer that in the affirmative. “Er,” he said. 

“Yes, he is,” said Isla, from behind him. 

The kissogram immediately embarked on her song. Something about his eyes of blue. It was so mortifying that John spent the entire time saying, “You can stop, you know. It’s quite alright. Can you just stop?” 

The kissogram finally, mercifully, did stop and lean in and John dodged her and said, “That’s fine, I think we can skip that bit.”

The kissogram shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“Who sent you?” John asked. 

“The agency,” she answered, unhelpfully. 

“I mean who hired you.”

“Oh, that’s anonymous.” The kissogram gave him a broad smile. “Got to figure that out for yourself, mate. Cheers!” She waved at him and then she was on her way. 

John turned to find Isla staring at him. 

“Someone hired you a _kissogram_?” she said. 

John thought of the bouquet of roses and wondered if he was being stalked. 

***

He was definitely being stalked. 

Because, outside his window, a violin was being played. Plaintively. Romantically. 

_Jesus Christ_ , thought John. Did it have to be the violin? Really? Who was this strange person who was stalking him with odd quasi-romantic outburst gestures? Who was _torturing_ him this way? Hadn’t he been through enough?

John was relieved Isla hadn’t stayed the night, still thrown off by the whole weird kissogram thing that morning. It meant that John wasn’t going to have to answer questions about a violin serenade outside his window. 

“That’s enough,” John decided, and practically threw himself out of the bed. He walked over to the window and opened it and stuck his head out. The person playing the violin was in shadow, barely visible. “Do you think you could keep it down?” John called out to him. Or her, he supposed. Her was more likely, wasn’t it?

The violin playing paused only momentarily, resuming against almost immediately. 

John gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to do some more shouting. Instead, he marched downstairs and out onto the street, where the person playing violin was slouched into the shadows on the side of the building. 

“Who hired you?” John demanded, stalking up to him. 

The violin-playing slid to a halt, but the player said nothing. John ducked his head, hoping to catch the player’s face with a bit of street light. 

And then John wheeled backward, too shaken even to form a word. Hallucinating, he thought. He was hallucinating. He was losing his mind. He’d always worried that eventually his PTSD-strained state would cause a complete mental break, and now it was happening. 

He closed his eyes, because his eyes were clearly not working properly. 

And then a voice he had not heard in months—a voice he was never supposed to hear again—said, “John.”

Great, and now his ears were joining in the hallucinatory fun. 

John opened his eyes, because he couldn’t resist, having not heard that voice in so long. He desperately wanted Sherlock Holmes to be standing in front of him. 

Except that there was Sherlock Holmes, standing in front of him, when he opened his eyes. 

  


And John’s reaction was to punch him in the face. 

***

“Who—the— _bloody_ —” John managed to knock the Sherlock imposter entirely to the ground, violin skidding away as John deposited himself firmly on top of the man, pinning him down. “Who are you?” he demanded. 

Sherlock’s unusual eyes blinked up at him, catching whatever light there was to catch, and John thought that it was unfair that they had even somehow managed to duplicate Sherlock’s _eyes_. “It’s me,” he said, in Sherlock’s voice. 

“Shut up,” said John, “and start talking.”

“That’s contradictory—”

John drove his arm into the man’s windpipe, listening with satisfaction as he gurgled for breath, and bit out, “Who are you. Start. Talking.”

“I can’t,” gasped the man. “You’re choking me.”

John eased up a little bit. 

The man gulped down some oxygen and, on the exhale, said, “John. It’s me. Don’t choke me again.”

“You’re _dead_ ,” John reminded him, dryly. 

“Not so. As a doctor, the fact of my aliveness should hopefully be obvious to you.”

“Oh, my God,” said John, “you’ve got his insults down cold.”

“John. I’m him. I’m _me_.”

“Really? What’s my favorite television show?”

There was a moment of silence. “Something terrible?” the man underneath him ventured, finally. 

“What did you always used to do when I broke up with my girlfriends?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I never paid attention to that tediousness.”

“How many times did you drug my coffee?”

“Once.” Pause. “That you know of.”

John sat up slowly and stared at the man underneath him. Sherlock. _Sherlock_. 

“Are you satisfied with my answers to that series of trick questions?” drawled the man with the pale skin and the sharp cheekbones and the moonlight eyes and the dark curls. _Sherlock_. 

“You’re dead,” John said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

“I’m really, really not,” Sherlock replied. “And, actually, it’s an interesting story—”

“No.” John, shaking his head, trembling all over, scrambled off of Sherlock and then to his feet. “No, no, no.”

“It is, though.” Sherlock picked himself up to his feet as well. “In order to—”

“ _No_!” John shouted, sure he was waking everyone around him up. “What are you _talking_ about? This is not a _story_ for you to tell me.”

“But it is. I faked my death because—”

“You _faked_ your _death_?”

“Obviously,” said Sherlock, after a second, sounding almost delicate. 

He was _talking down_ to him, thought John. He had _faked_ his own _death_ , right in front of John, while John had mourned and grieved and imagined he was lurking around every corner, and he was literally talking to him as if he were three years old for having trouble wrapping his mind around this. 

“Go to hell,” spat John. 

Sherlock looked almost quizzical. “What—”

“I don’t want to hear you—” John jabbed a finger into Sherlock’s chest—“or your ‘explanations.’ That’s not fair. You fake your death and leave me here to pick up the pieces and now you want to waltz right back in with an ‘explanation.’”

“It was dangerous,” Sherlock said, “and I couldn’t—”

“No.” John shook his head, insistent. Because if he let Sherlock talk, Sherlock would weave his web of words, and John would—John didn’t know what he would do. Because he had never let himself entertain the possibility that Sherlock was alive. That Sherlock would show up outside his window playing a violin. “You make me think you’re dead and leave me behind and I nearly go mad picking up the pieces and now you want to show up with some kind of stupid sonata as if everything’s okay? That is not normal behavior, Sherlock!”

Sherlock looked at him for a long moment. John paced and pulled his hands through his hair and tried to make this make sense. He was a _doctor_. Dead people didn’t just _come back to life_. Not even _Sherlock Holmes_.

“No,” Sherlock said, after a moment. “Not normal.” 

Then he picked up his violin and actually _left_. 

Which was what John had asked him to do, had wanted him to do, so it made no sense at all that John stood outside staring after him and wishing he would come back. 

A life that made sense, John thought, must be amazing. 

***

John charted Sherlock Holmes’s triumphant return via television and newspapers like everyone else. Sherlock was everywhere, looking proud and condescending, his reputation vindicated. John watched him sweep rudely through crowds of clamoring reporters, not even bothering with a _no comment_ , looking down his nose at all of them. John felt like he couldn’t escape Sherlock, that he inhabited John’s every waking moment, which wasn’t fair because John finally _had_ stopped spending every single waking moment brooding over Sherlock. 

Isla turned on the telly after dinner one night, and the picture on the screen was 221 Baker Street, steps he had climbed up, a door he had opened, with the comfortable habitualness of it being home. The reporters were camped out in front of it, waiting for movement from inside, because Sherlock had been holed up there for days. John knew these things without wanting to know them. 

He washed the dishes while trying not to eavesdrop, but he could hear his name, and he knew the reporters were speculating on when he would show up there. There were reporters dogging him, too. He at least always said _no comment_ to them and gave them tight little smiles as he passed by them. 

“I can’t believe he never tried to get in touch with you,” Isla said, when John had prolonged dish-washing as long as he could and walked into the lounge. 

“Can we not watch this?” asked John, and shut the telly off.

“I mean, if only to _apologize_. Because you didn’t know anything about this, did you?” Isla gestured to the silent television with her wineglass. 

“No,” John said, shortly. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

“He’s a right bastard, isn’t he?” Isla swigged her wine. “To do what he did to you and not apologize. To not even try to _reach_ you.”

John didn’t mention a bouquet of blood red roses, the kissogram at the door, a violin sonata outside his window. 

Isla said, “I thought you two were supposed to be best friends.”

John said, “Me, too.”

***

“You’ve got to leave eventually, Sherlock,” said Mycroft.

“No,” said Sherlock to the back of the sofa. “I am never leaving this flat again. You can’t make me.”

“Is it necessary to be so childish about everything?” Mycroft asked, long-suffering. 

“Yes,” answered Sherlock, belligerently. 

“The Met is willing to work with you again. Eager for it, even. I have it on good authority from Detective Inspector Lestrade that he has a variety of interesting cases he’d appreciate your help with.”

Sherlock snorted. “I bet you do. And I bet he would.”

There was a short moment of silence. “Sherlock, what was the point of coming back if you’re just going to do _this_? You might as well be dead.”

Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut. He had come back for John. There was no John. So yes, Sherlock agreed, he might as well be dead. “Miscalculation,” Sherlock said to the sofa. 

Mycroft sighed heavily and left. 

He was replaced by Mrs. Hudson, who fussed about the smoke in the flat. 

“Sherlock, you can’t smoke in here, it isn’t good for you.”

“Mrs. Hudson, I’m dead, haven’t you heard?”

“You’re _not_ dead, I thought. Isn’t that the reason I’ve got an army of reporters parked outside my door? I won’t dare venture outside without freshly fixing my hair.”

“Dead, not dead, doesn’t matter,” Sherlock dismissed. 

There was a moment of silence. “They’ll lose interest, Sherlock. They’ll move on. It won’t be like this forever.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sherlock insisted. 

“Why don’t you ring John?”

Sherlock wanted to scream to be left alone. “John doesn’t want to talk to me,” he said, dully. 

“That’s not true,” said Mrs. Hudson, after a pause. 

“Yes, it is. He told me himself to leave him alone.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean it, dear—”

“I’m sure he _did_.”

“And so that’s it? You’re just going to give up?” Mrs. Hudson demanded. 

The characterization made Sherlock seethe. “I’m not—”

“Sherlock Holmes, you turn over and face me.” 

Sherlock didn’t move, hesitating. 

“ _This instant_.”

Sherlock meekly rolled over and looked at Mrs. Hudson. 

“I won’t let you bury yourself in here hiding from the problems that _you_ caused in the first place. You broke his heart. That means it’s up to you to fix it, and he’s within his rights to force you to do that. You need to apologize, properly, so that he understands that you mean it.”

“He told me I wasn’t normal,” Sherlock heard himself say, because that had been bothering him ever since John had said it. 

“You’re both forgetting that that’s always been what he loved about you,” replied Mrs. Hudson. 

***

It took Sherlock another day to gather enough energy to reach out and grab his laptop and bring it over to him. He navigated back to the message board he’d used last time. Their suggestions for how to woo a reluctant lover hadn’t been successful but maybe that had been his fault for not being precise in describing his problem. 

So he created another identity and posted a new thread. 

_Quarrelled with significant other. Must make it up. Suggestions?_

He had his first reply within fifteen minutes. 

_jewellery? Always works for me ;)_

John didn’t wear jewellery, thought Sherlock, dismissively. But maybe he could come up with an equivalent. 

Sherlock thought. 

***

“You don’t tell me anything,” Isla said. 

John cocked his head and looked at her in confusion. 

“You’ve got a package over there. From _Harrods_ , no less.” Isla smiled at him flirtatiously and said, playfully, “So what aren’t you telling me? Is it a present for me?” She walked her fingers up his arm. 

John looked at the package he’d thrown onto the dining room table when he’d come home to it after work. He had had a sinking feeling of dread that he knew exactly who the package was from, and he didn’t want to know what it was. He was going to send it back unopened. 

Except that Isla didn’t miss a trick when it came to the potential of expensive gifts that might be for her. She hadn’t yet been right—John thought it was incredibly optimistic of her at this stage in their relationship—but she apparently lived in hope. 

“It’s…not,” he said, lamely. 

She looked amused, clearly thinking he was achieving a terrible lie. “Oh, really? You’re just buying yourself things from Harrods these days?”

“It’s…misdirected.”

“It has your name on it, John. Well.” She stood up and walked playfully over to the package and shook it. “If it’s not for me, then you won’t mind if I peek inside, will you?”

“Isla,” he said, sharply. “No.”

“No, you don’t mind?” She didn’t seem to catch that his mood had turned, was still treating this as some kind of tease. 

“No, I _do_ mind.”

“Ah, then it _is_ for me!” she said, triumphantly, as she ripped right through the package. Bloody hell, she had nails like _daggers_ , thought John, as she pulled out of the box…jumpers. Several really beautiful jumpers, all in differing shades of blue. 

Isla looked confused. “These are…men’s jumpers.”

John was busy staring. Jumpers. Sherlock had bought him _jumpers_. 

  


“But you don’t wear nice things like this,” Isla said. 

She wasn’t wrong. John couldn’t even bother to deny it. And anyway he wasn’t paying attention. _Jumpers_. Why would Sherlock send him _jumpers_?

“Where did these come from? There’s no note. John. Someone’s sent you hundreds of pounds worth of jumpers. No.” She was checking the tags. “These are top-notch. All of these. Thousands of pounds worth of jumpers. With no note.” She looked up at him. “I know you didn’t buy these for yourself.”

“I’m sending them back,” John managed to say. 

“You’re not surprised by this at all.”

“No.” John sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m very much past the point of being ‘surprised’ by anything he does.”

“He?” echoed Isla, and then, “Wait. Are these from Sherlock?”

“No,” said John, sarcastically, as he gathered them up and thrust them back into the box, “they’re from my other mad stalker.”

“Hang on. Sherlock’s _stalking_ you?”

John put the box back on the table. “He’s…No. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“He wants to talk to you,” Isla realized. “You don’t want to talk to him?”

“No, I don’t want to talk to him,” John snapped, leaning back against the table. “Would _you_ want to talk to someone who had done to you what he did to me?”

“I’d want to know why he did it, yeah.”

“Well, I _don’t_ want to know why he did it. I don’t want to listen to him. When he talks, he manages to convince me to take for granted his _insanity_. No, not take it for granted; to find it charming; to bloody _like_ it. You do not understand what his voice is like. It gets into your head— _he_ gets into your head—and you find yourself forgetting that you can’t walk without a cane and leaping over London rooftops. I can’t talk to him because if I talk to him I’ll take him back.”

“You’ll take him back,” repeated Isla, flatly. 

Possibly a more telling choice of words than John had intended, he thought. 

Isla stared at him. “You really _don’t_ tell me anything.”

***

“Who’s my next patient?” John asked the receptionist, and the receptionist answered, “Him,” and there was Sherlock, in his usual coat, looking sleek and composed and lovely. 

John said, “You weren’t on my schedule.”

“Yes, I was. James Sigerson.”

“That’s not you.”

“Isn’t it?” Sherlock inquired, mildly, and then swept down the hallway, going unerringly to the examining room, as if he’d scoped the layout of the clinic out. 

He probably had. 

John set his jaw and stomped down the hallway after him and said, “You have to leave.”

“Are you refusing me medical care?” Sherlock asked. He’d shrugged off his Belstaff and was already sliding out of his suit jacket as well. 

“You don’t need medical care.”

“How do you know? I’ve got a bit of a cough, I’m very worried about pneumonia, you should listen to the state of my lungs. I smoke, you know.” Sherlock coughed in the fakest and most dramatic way. “Do I need to take off my shirt for this examination or will this do?”

“Sherlock,” said John. 

Sherlock perched himself up on the examining couch and gave a loud, hacking cough. 

John sighed and walked into the room and closed the door and grabbed his stethoscope. “You can’t do this, you know,” he said. 

“Now, then, even smokers are allowed to worry about their lungs.”

“That’s not what I mean,” John said, and put his stethoscope up against Sherlock’s chest. And paused. Because Sherlock’s heart was racing, the beats in his ear rabbit-fast. Was he _nervous_? John looked up at him, intending just a glance but getting caught by the proximity of Sherlock’s eyes, his magnetic gaze, drawing him in. 

“I couldn’t think of another way to get you to talk to me,” said Sherlock, in a rush, while his heartbeat thudded through John’s brain. 

John felt suddenly terrible, because Sherlock looked wretched over the lengths he’d had to go to just to get John to _talk_ , and maybe John _had_ been unreasonable. 

And then John remembered that Sherlock had faked his own death in the most painful manner possible for John and let him go through hell and _Sherlock_ had the nerve to look wretched over the situation. 

“Take a deep breath,” John said, and the fact that that he didn’t say _go to hell_ was a bigger victory for Sherlock than he wanted Sherlock to know. 

Sherlock took a deep breath and John pretended to listen and stepped away and said, sardonically, “I think you’ll live.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, trying out a little smile on him. “So the news reports say. Did you like the jumpers?”

“You should stop smoking, though.”

“What if I said I was sorry?”

John waited a beat and then deliberately misunderstood. “I’m afraid that won’t help your lungs.”

“Would you come back?”

“ _If_ you said you were sorry, would I come back? Is that the question?”

“Yes. You can’t tell me you don’t miss…us.”

“Do you think that I just sat around all this time _missing_ you?” Which was truer than John wanted to admit. “Do you think I never _moved on_?”

Sherlock lifted an eyebrow at him. “‘Moved on’? With a string of meaningless girlfriends and a job that bores you and a little too much money spent on horse races?”

“Get out,” said John, his voice lethally quiet. 

“You haven’t ‘moved on.’” Sherlock leaped off the examining couch. “That’s a preposterous idea.” Sherlock walked over to him, crowding him, because he was up against the desk and couldn’t move. “You miss me daily. You miss me _hourly_.”

John resisted the urge to shove him bodily away. “Sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

Sherlock leaned onto the desk, an arm on either side of John, and held his gaze, and for one wild, heady moment John thought he was going to kiss him and he panicked because he didn’t know what he would do if Sherlock Holmes kissed him and he was terrified that what he would do would be to kiss him back. 

Sherlock didn’t kiss him, although his eyes did drop to his mouth. But, after a moment, Sherlock pushed himself away from the desk, straightening and saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It took John a moment before he could say, “No, you won’t,” and even then it came out breathier than he would have liked. 

***

John spent twenty minutes pacing the tiny confines of his examining room, trying to calm himself down, after Sherlock left. 

Then he went and told the receptionist that he didn’t want to see James Sigerson anymore. _Or_ Sherlock Holmes. 

The receptionist, unimpressed by their minor celebrity status, just shrugged. 

***

John, that night, found himself staring at Isla next to him on the sofa and thinking of Sherlock’s face filling his vision, Sherlock’s body caging him in against the desk, Sherlock’s breath over his face, Sherlock’s heart beating wildly in his ears. 

John found his brain was full of Sherlock when he opened his mouth and said, “We need to talk.”

***

John scanned his list of patients for obvious pseudonyms. 

He didn’t even know what an obvious pseudonym might be. 

He searched the waiting room, all day, and never caught a glimpse of Sherlock. 

And he was _disappointed_. 

Which made no sense, because Sherlock had been arrogant and obnoxious the day before and John didn’t want to see him anymore. 

***

John stepped outside at the end of his workday and there was Sherlock, skulking in a doorway across the street, hidden from the persistent rain. John paused, letting the rain fall in rivulets over him, and felt the inevitability that he was going to wait for Sherlock, who crossed the street and walked over to him and held out two takeaway cups. 

“Coffee or tea?” said Sherlock. “I’ve brought you both.”

John stared at him. “You what?”

“I heard your criticisms about my previous behavior, acknowledged the validity of some of them, and am striving to improve,” recited Sherlock. “Coffee or tea?”

“Have you been reading self-help books?” asked John, incredulously. 

“Are you going to accept one or the other?” Sherlock demanded. “Because it’s stupid to stand out here in the rain whilst you _mock_ me.”

John felt the corners of his lips twitch in a smile. And he was annoyed about this smile, he didn’t want to smile at Sherlock, but at the same time it felt _so bloody good_ to smile. He felt like he hadn’t smiled since the day Sherlock had flung himself off the roof in front of him. “Tea,” he said, and took it, and then said, “Is it drugged?”

“No, I couldn’t find any mind control drugs,” said Sherlock, sulkily. 

And John laughed. It startled him, this laugh, felt rusty and awkward coming out of him, but he threw back his head and laughed in the rain at Sherlock Holmes. 

And when he finished laughing, Sherlock was looking at him quizzically but also with tentative hope and with a lot of what John imagined was affection. 

“Can we have dinner?” Sherlock asked, his tone drowning with hopefulness. 

John’s hand clenched reflexively around the cup he was holding. “Sherlock…” he said. 

“You’ve broken up with your latest girlfriend. You have no plans for dinner. You were planning on stopping by a pub on your way home.”

“How do you _know_ that?”

“Have dinner with me,” Sherlock practically begged him. 

John closed his eyes and waited for a moment to pass. The moment when he would have said _yes_ , and by the end of the meal he would have forgiven Sherlock for everything and Sherlock had never even _apologized_. 

John opened his eyes and looked away, into the rain all around them. He said, “I don’t think I can…” 

“I’m going to ask you every day until you say yes.”

“Sherlock,” sighed John, and then didn’t know what he was going to say. _Don’t do that_? _Please definitely do that_?

“See you tomorrow,” said Sherlock, mildly, and walked away, leaving John with his cup of tea. 

***

John lay awake most of the night wondering what he should tell Sherlock the next day. 

He should tell him to leave him alone, obviously. Everything with Sherlock had been disastrous; he shouldn’t fall back into that habit. He would tell Sherlock to leave him alone, and eventually Sherlock would take the hint. 

***

“Good morning,” Sherlock said as soon as John stepped outside, taking John completely by surprise. 

“Jesus,” he said, as Sherlock stepped out of the adjacent alley. “What are you doing skulking there?”

“I wasn’t ‘skulking.’ Here. This is for you.” He handed John a box. 

John glanced at it. “Chocolates.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you buy me a box of chocolates?”

Sherlock opened his mouth as if to speak but said nothing. 

“I don’t even particularly _like_ chocolate,” John pointed out. 

Sherlock scowled at him. “You are incredibly difficult, you know. You don’t seem to like any of the usual things. At least I didn’t send you diamond earrings.”

“What would I have done with diamond earrings?”

“Exactly. So you got jumpers instead. Although I haven’t noticed you wearing any of them. Did you not like them?” Sherlock asked the question anxiously. 

So John was quick to assure him, “They were lovely, Sherlock. But _jumpers_?”

“You wear a lot of jumpers. And you don’t wear a lot of diamond earrings.”

“Both true statements,” John agreed, slowly, trying to make this make sense. “Is it just that I’m not used to you anymore? Is that why I’m finding this conversation so confusing?”

“What about breakfast? If you won’t do dinner, could we have breakfast?”

“Why do you want to have breakfast with me?” John asked, frankly. 

Sherlock looked flummoxed by the question. “Because you’re _you_.”

“So?”

“So I always want to have breakfast with you. And dinner. And…everything, really.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You have a funny way of showing your dedication to spending time with me.”

Sherlock actually had the nerve to look quizzical. “But I’ve been sending you—”

“I don’t mean _now_ , Sherlock. Oh, yes, just now, you seem to be quite dedicated to stalking me with weird gifts.”

Sherlock paused, then said, “Are they weird?”

John thought he could easily have throttled him. “Not the _point_ , Sherlock. That is not the _point_.”

“Come to breakfast with me,” said Sherlock, quickly. “Tell me what the point is—”

“I don’t need to go to breakfast with you to tell you my point. I can tell you my point right now, because it’s one sentence: _You left me_.” John realized that wasn’t exactly what he had intended to say, not exactly how he’d intended to phrase it. But it was true. What had destroyed John was that Sherlock had _left_ him; the method of the leaving was immaterial. Sherlock had gone away and taken everything worth living out of John’s life and John had collapsed in his wake and Sherlock seemed to have _no idea_.

And Sherlock looked astonished. Sherlock looked _astonished_ that he was angry about this. 

John marched away, because he couldn’t stand to be in front of Sherlock looking hurt and amazed that John had been _mean_ to him and _refused breakfast_ , as if Sherlock had been perfectly angelic and John was unjustified in being upset. 

John was halfway to work before he realized he was still clutching the sodding box of chocolates. He threw them violently into a rubbish bin and then he thought, _To hell with work_ , and turned into the nearest bookmaker’s. 

***

The thing about losing a great deal of money on his very first bet was that his day spiraled downward from there. 

And it ended with him, drunk, thinking it would be a very good idea to tell Sherlock, once and for all, that he didn’t want him in his life and Sherlock had to leave him alone. 

There were still reporters camped outside Baker Street. Not as many, but enough that John stood on the corner and realized this had not been the best-thought-out idea of his life. And then he thought, what the hell, he used to be known for being a bit reckless. 

So he marched right up to the door of 221B and rang the doorbell and steadfastly ignored the reporters who were begging him for a comment. 

Sherlock didn’t answer the doorbell. John rang it and rang it and rang it and leaned on it and finally the window above opened and Sherlock stuck his head out. 

“If you don’t—” began his threat, and then trailed off into, “John.”

“Let. Me. In,” said John, and punctuated each word with the ringing of the bell. 

“Um,” said Sherlock. 

“Isn’t this what you bloody _wanted_?” John sneered up at him. 

The reporters looked between them, voraciously curious. 

“Yes. Yes. Give me…two minutes.” Sherlock’s head disappeared. 

Two minutes. John stared at the door in disbelief. Sherlock had been stalking him for days, and now he was making him _wait_? 

Annoyed, John turned on his heel and marched down the front steps. 

“He said two minutes,” a reporter said. “Aren’t you going to wait?”

“I waited too bloody long for him,” John retorted, and kept walking. 

He was all the way to the corner before Sherlock caught up to him, grabbed his arm, turned him around. 

“Sorry,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. The place was a mess and I didn’t want you to—”

“The place was a mess?” John echoed. “As if I haven’t _lived_ with you? I know all about—”

“Can we go inside now? Please?”

“I _wanted_ to go inside,” grumbled John, “and you suddenly turned into Mary Bloody Poppins cleaning up the bloody nursery.”

“Yes,” said Sherlock, pleasantly, herding John back down the street to 221. “That’s nice.”

“You have no idea who I’m talking about, do you?”

“A woman who is either a maid or a murderer, depending on how you intended the word ‘bloody’ to be interpreted in front of ‘nursery.’” Sherlock nudged John through the door and closed it soundly behind them. 

“Oh, my God,” said John, and leaned dizzily against the wall in the front hall. “Oh, my _God_ ,” he said again, and laughed until he was breathless. 

“Come upstairs,” Sherlock suggested, when he was done laughing hysterically. 

John stared at him. “I hate you _so much_ ,” he said. 

Sherlock swallowed thickly and said nothing. 

John sighed and trudged up the stairs and into 221B, and then stopped dead. It was possible Sherlock had cleaned hastily but mostly the sitting room looked as if several tornadoes had whipped through it. And, worse, it reeked of cigarette smoke. 

“Have you been smoking in the flat?”

“Er, yes,” said Sherlock. 

“Mrs. Hudson _let_ you?”

“Well,” said Sherlock. “Yes.”

John frowned. “You know, this is the problem.”

“The problem?”

“You came back and everybody fawned all over you, the conquering hero, the vindicated detective. Everyone made it so _easy_ for you. You got back to Baker Street and you thought it was all going to be just as you left it and I was going to be waiting in a room for you, in suspended animation, ready to resume my life whenever you deemed it convenient for you.” As John spoke, he wandered through the flat, touching things here and there. 

Sherlock stayed stiffly by the sitting room door he’d closed. He said nothing. 

So John kept talking. “And I didn’t fall into place for you, so you got stroppy and thought that you’d _make_ me fall into place. That’s not how it works, Sherlock. I’m not some game piece you can move this way and that however it suits you. And how dare you think I am.” John had wandered back into Sherlock’s vicinity, and now he stalked up to him, and Sherlock actually shrank against the door in reaction, which made John feel a bit triumphant. “I don’t want to talk to you, Sherlock. I don’t want you to talk to me. I don’t want to go back to the way things were.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Sherlock, viciously. 

John blinked. “You don’t _believe_ me?”

“No. Definitely not. You want to come back here so badly you can _taste_ it. Thinking about it is eating you alive. You’re scared to make the move. Which is annoying, because I’ve never known you to be cowardly.”

“ _Scared_? You think I’m _scared_ of you?”

“I think you’re scared of _us_.”

“And you’re bloody right!” John shouted at him. Sherlock blinked in reaction but otherwise stayed right where he was, against the door, and John kept standing close enough to him to keep him there. “You, us, _this_ —it almost destroyed me. Do you understand? I got _shot_ in a _desert_ far away from home and almost _died_ , and it didn’t destroy me the way _you_ did. Of course I’m scared of you! You’re the most terrifying entity I’ve ever met.”

Sherlock stared at him, and John tried to catch his breath and closed his eyes and wondered what had made him think it was a good idea to do this. 

And then Sherlock said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “I’m sorry.”

John stilled, holding his breath and opening his eyes. Sherlock’s eyes were very wide and very dark, his dilated pupils swallowing them up. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m sorry I did that to _us_. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I did what I did. I wish I could go back and change it. Make a different decision. I missed you every day, every minute. I miss you now. I talk to you for two minutes every day and then I spend the rest of the day thinking about the next time I’ll get to talk to you. Please come back. Can you please come back? Everything is emptiness all around me.”

John just looked at him. Because his mind couldn’t process what Sherlock saying to him. He knit his brows together and wished he’d had less to drink and said, “You miss me?”

“Of course I miss you. How could you ever think otherwise? Idiot.”

“You left me,” John reminded him. 

“I shouldn’t have.”

“I waited for you for _so long_ , and you never came back.”

“Yes. I did. I’m here right now.”

“But it took you so long.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

John regarded Sherlock for a long moment, looking back at home so honestly and so openly. He looked vulnerable and miserable and painfully young, and so different than how he had looked up until that point, whenever John had seen him, so breezy and confident and pulled-together while John had been flailing. And John realized at that moment his fatal mistake: that Sherlock had been putting on his usual show. And John should have _known_ that, John had known Sherlock better than anyone, but he’d been so sad, and so heartbroken, and so _angry_ , and he’d let himself be blind as to the truth, which was that Sherlock was hurting, too. Maybe, for the first time, John let himself admit, Sherlock was hurting just as much as he was. 

The anger drained out of him abruptly, all at once, leaving him exhausted. Too exhausted to stay standing. He collapsed forward, against Sherlock, his face pressed into Sherlock’s neck. He fit there perfectly. _Perfectly_. 

Sherlock was frozen underneath him, pressed against the door. John burrowed in, thinking that he could possibly fall asleep just like that. He was so tired. He hadn’t slept in months and months and months…

“John?” said Sherlock, muffled. 

John made a noise against Sherlock’s skin. 

“You’re…leaning on me.”

John made another noise. 

“Just wanted to make sure you were aware of that.”

John made another noise. 

There was a moment of silence. 

“Are you going to…do this for a long time?”

John considered. “Maybe.” A beat. “Would that bother you?”

“No,” said Sherlock. “You’re exactly filling all the empty space.”

  



End file.
